Quick Links

Club PA 2.0 has arrived! If you'd like to access some extra PA content and help support the forums, check it out at patreon.com/ClubPA

The image size limit has been raised to 1mb! Anything larger than that should be linked to. This is a HARD limit, please do not abuse it.

Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.

Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!

My one complaint about this particular thread title is that even though the Doctor is thousands of years old at this point (and the actor is not too far from 40) she still gets called a girl instead of a woman.

That tugged on me so much harder than whenever Tennant or Smith were sad about being alone. I swear this show is Doctor Who meets Broadchurch, and I haven't decided yet if that's ultimately good or bad, but there are times like this when I'd say it works great. I'm speaking strictly of the cinematography alone, and then you add in Whittaker's performance, and that's it, there's the tears!

On my rewatch of Tennant's shows I've now almost reached the end, and while the acknowledged classics are all still pretty good I didn't expect to come away thinking holy shit Midnight is the best episode in his whole run. I remember it being good, but on rewatching it I think it's brilliant. Absolute belter.

I really like the new Doctor, and the companions are fine. But man was the writing just ... uninspired? Mediocre at best?

Having two people with that skin color just go "wheee, it's 1950s Alabama, let's go out there! It'll be so much fun, no time to talk about how we may or may not blend in" makes all four of them look stupid, and I don't feel like the characters are meant to be stupid.

The scene behind the dumpster at the hotel was just bad exposition. Yes, we all get how having them experience this era of human history makes them appreciate how far we've come but also how far we have to go. They don't need to cram it into a very unnatural conversation.

And while I get that every iteration gets some personality changes, having the Doctor have no reaction whatsoever to a companion using a *gun* on someone is a big deal and seems like they just didn't think about it.

OK, the things I did like:

I assume the villain is some sort of anti-human alien that will be an ongoing antagonist, and I liked him as a villain. The Doctor calling someone a "rando" made me smile. The final scene where the grandpa had to sit and watch but not do anything was emotionally resonant.

On my rewatch of Tennant's shows I've now almost reached the end, and while the acknowledged classics are all still pretty good I didn't expect to come away thinking holy shit Midnight is the best episode in his whole run. I remember it being good, but on rewatching it I think it's brilliant. Absolute belter.

Midnight is absolutely top tier and I don't think it gets enough love.

Tony Shalhoub taking over the role in 1987 threw me for a loop - for one thing the footage from Galaxy Quest they use is from the 90s, not the 80s, but also looking over Shalhoub's imdb page confirms that he was very early in his career in 1987 and was doing stuff like playing an unnamed "terrorist leader" in a single episode of a TV show I've never heard of. So it's hard to imagine him being the main star of a TV show at that point and what do you mean the video is just a lighthearted joke and I shouldn't be nitpicking it to death

If you're going to give the show a legally-distinct-from-Donald-Trump character and not have him get devoured by giant spiders or at least arrested, what the hell are you doing?
The Doctor's destroyed people's careers for being less of a dick.

If you're going to give the show a legally-distinct-from-Donald-Trump character and not have him get devoured by giant spiders or at least arrested, what the hell are you doing?
The Doctor's destroyed people's careers for being less of a dick.

More spiffing work from Walsh, though. You can see his character think and decide and change his mind.

Chibnall doesn’t seem to be able to do the technobabble bullshit scenes as well as Davies or Moffat. They feel quite flat in comparison. And Yaz, even though the episode was about her family, still feels indistinct.

Am I the only one who thought the solution to the latest episode was rather cruel?

So I understand that it’s a kids show and the Doctor’s been pretty consistently anti gun since at least Eccleston, but surely it would have been more merciful to kill the spiders off quickly. You have multiple large predators, who have already killed several people, and your solutions is to lock them all up inside a small vault with 6 months worth of food so that they can have a “natural” death? The mother spider had literally grown so large that it could no longer breathe, but the Doctor berates notTrump for at least giving it a quick death.

Felt like the morality of the episode was approaching Kill the Moon levels of advocating never ever taking a life in an circumstance. For a kid’s show you probably should aim for that message, but then maybe don’t write episodes where you advocate leaving a creature alive only to die slowly rather than at least ending things quickly. Please don’t take this as being pro-gun, I’m from the UK and about as pro gun control (oh god don’t turn this into a thread about that) as you like, but within the context provided by the episode it felt like shooting the genetically modified giant spiders would have been the less cruel option, even if it wasn’t “natural”.

So one particularly tense bit of that episode was not helped at all by a plastic bag in the corner of my living room crackling quietly at the exact moment something on screen did. Nearly jumped out of my skin.